Guide to Item Changes in Warlords of Draenor

Item Changes in WarlordsFrom the gear squish to removed stats, items have undergone big changes in Warlords of Draenor. This guide covers all the major changes, including spec-specific primary stats, new tertiary stats, gear augmentations, and removed stats.

You can see your character's gear with the Warlords Profiler.

Just go to http://www.wowhead.com/list and enter your character's name and realm on the left-hand side for "Lookup Battle.net Profile."

It will display your gear with up-to-date stats, including columns for self-buffs and raid-buffs.

Armor

Armor changes primary stats (Agility, Intellect, Strength) and set bonuses based on your spec. There is no "strength plate" or "intellect plate"--simply plate that changes based on your role.

Secondary stats for armor remain unchanged when switching between specs. This means that if you really want different combinations of secondary stats for each spec, you need multiple items for each slot.

When looking at an item's tooltip, you will see multiple primary stats on it now--with the stats that don't benefit your spec hidden. So for example, Vest of Forceful Fury would have Intellect hidden if a Guardian Druid wore it, and Agility hidden if a Balance Druid wore it.

On item pages, you can imitate Warlords of Draenor tooltip behavior by going to "Showing tooltip for " and changing the class/spec to see the stat colors change.

Gear Augmentations

There are three ways players can get better-than-expected stats for a particular item--Warforged (+6 ilvls), an additional gem socket, and the presence of a bonus tertiary stat. It will take a while to farm up a complete "set" and may not be on every piece of gear.

Warforged: The item is +6 ilvls higher.

Extra sockets: sockets will be used much more sparingly in Warlords.

Tertiary stats: Movement Speed (Increases your movement speed), Indestructible (Causes the item to not take durability damage), Leech (Causes you to be healed for a portion of all damage and healing done), Avoidance (Reduces your damage taken from area-of-effect attacks). We already saw some of this with Siege of Orgrimmar trinkets like Juggernaut's Focusing Crystal for Lifesteal and Frenzied Crystal of Rage for Cleave. These are also considered bonus stats and aren't part of an item's regular stat budget.

It will be very rare to get an item that has all three augmentations at once.

These are the following types of gear that can all three augmentations:

Uncommon-quality quest rewards can be up to 20 ilvls higher, and rare-quality quest rewards can be up to 10 ilvls higher.

The following types of gear do not have augmentations:

Crafted Warlords gear.

Conquest ilvl 660 PvP gear.

Apexis vendor gear.

Legendary rings.

World-drop BoEs.

Random Stats

Several types of gear in Warlords do not come with fixed secondary stats. This means that you are guaranteed to get Agility, Intellect, or Strength on an item based on your spec, but a random combination of Critical Strike, Haste, Mastery, Versatility, Multistrike.

These are the secondary stat combos that can be found on gear. The amounts of each stat found on gear can vary slightly:

of the Fireflash, Crit/Haste

Peerless, Crit/Mastery

of the Savage, Crit/Multistrike

of the Quickblade, Crit/Versatility

of the Feverflare, Haste/Mastery

of the Deft, Haste/Multistrike

of the Aurora, Haste/Versatility

of the Merciless, Mastery/Multistrike

of the Harmonious, Versatility/Mastery

of the Strategist, Versatility/Multistrike

For rings and amulets, tanks can also see Bonus Armor. These are the additional stat combos:

of the Guileful, Crit/Bonus Armor

of the Windshaper, Haste/Bonus Armor

of the Noble, Mastery/Bonus Armor

of the Stormbreaker, Bonus Armor/Multistrike

of the Stalwart, Versatility/Bonus Armor

For rings and amulets, healers can also Spirit. These are the additional stat combos:

of the Fanatic, Spirit/Crit

of the Zealot, Spirit/Haste

of the Diviner, Spirit/Mastery

of the Herald, Spirit/Multistrike

of the Augur, Spirit/Versatility

New Stats

There are new secondary stats in addition to critical strike, mastery and haste: Multistrike, Versatility, and Bonus Armor:

Versatility Increases damage and healing, and reduces damage taken

Multistrike Grants two chances for your damage and healing effects to fire an additional time, each at 30% effectiveness

Bonus Armor is only found on tank-appropriate Non-Armor pieces. This increases the tank's armor.

Readiness and Amplify initially were planned to be secondary stats, but were later scrapped.

In addition, there is a new type of stat--Tertiary/Minor. These stats have a small chance to be found on gear as an augmentation (see section below). Different tertiary stats many be limited to certain gear slots, based on the data.

The tertiary stats are:

Movement Speed: Increases your movement speed

Indestructible: Causes the item to not take durability damage

Leech: Causes you to be healed for a portion of all damage and healing done

Avoidance: Reduces your damage taken from area-of-effect attacks.

Cleave is a scrapped Tertiary stat.

Changed and Removed Stats

These stat changes are based on the "Primary Character Stats and Attack Power," "Itemization Changes," and "Hit and Expertise Removal" sections of the Warlords of Draenor Alpha Patch Notes.

Primary Stats

Agility and Intellect no longer provide critical strike, as Strength does not and that caused balancing issues.

Weapon ScalingAttack Power and Spell Power have been tweaked to address scaling issues between caster weapons and physical weapons.

Each point of Agility or Strength now grants 1 Attack Power (down from 2). All other sources of Attack Power now grant half as much as before.

Weapon Damage values on all weapons have been reduced by 20%.

Attack Power now increases Weapon Damage at a rate of 1 DPS per 3.5 Attack Power (up from 1 DPS per 14 Attack Power).

Attack Power, Spell Power, or Weapon Damage now affect the entire healing or damage throughput of player spells.

Dodge and Parry

Active mitigation has been a tanking model that has worked out well, so Dodge and Parry is kept on the low side.

Dodge and Parry are removed and have been converted into Critical Strike, Haste, or mastery on armor pieces, or Bonus Armor on non-armor pieces. In addition, all players now have 0% chance to be dodged and 3% chance to be parried. Tanks receive an additional 3% reduction in chance to be parried.

You can't get Dodge and Parry from gear anymore, but you can get it from other stats and some abilities like Sanctuary.

The amount of Dodge gained per Agility has been reduced by 25%, and the amount of Parry gained per Strength has been reduced by 25%.

Hit and Expertise

Hit and Expertise are removed and have been converted into Critical Strike, Haste, or Mastery on existing gear. In addition, all players now have a 100% chance to hit and 0% chance to glance when fighting creatures up to 3 levels higher.

For gems, enchants, and all consumables, hit has been converted to critical strike, and expertise to haste.

As covered at the top of this blog, you can preview your character's Warlords stats by using our Warlords Profiler.

Gear Squish

The most shocking change at first glance is the stat squish--item tooltips are thousands of stats lower! This doesn't apply to only your gear though--everything is scaled down, including enemy creatures' health.

You will still feel just as powerful killing mobs and the numbers will be easier to understand as they are smaller. In addition, lots of players have been worried about their ability to solo old content, but Blizzard has announced players will deal bonus damage against lower-level creatures and take reduced damage from them.

To see the item squish in action, switch between Wowhead's live and Warlords databases via the "Warlords of Draenor" or "Live" option at the top left of the screen when looking at a particular item. Just keep in mind that this is a cosmetic stat change!

Meta gems and socket bonuses aren't found on Warlords gear, and many fewer items will have sockets in Warlords of Draenor. This was announced at BlizzCon.

All gem sockets in Warlords are prismatic, and Warlords gems do not have colors--they work in any color socket.

Like gear, enchants and gems are scaled down in Warlords of Draenor, which the database reflects.

Item Data Changes

Items in Warlords of Draenor have received a lot of internal changes that we have to adapt to here at Wowhead. Our goal is to have our users think that nothing has changed when using our database and tools, but we're quite busy behind-the-scenes.

Instead of each version of an item being linked to a unique item ID or database page, all versions are consolidated into one item ID/page in Warlords of Draenor. An item can now have a number of bonuses applied--ranging from a Raid Difficulty to a gem socket. In 6.0, there is one item ID associated with all versions of a Siege of Orgrimmar item, like Korven's Crimson Crescent, instead of six.

Warlords of Draenor and 6.0 items now display item bonuses on their Wowhead pages. Here's some examples of items with bonuses:

6.0 Siege of Orgrimmar items and Warlords Tier 17 items like Korven's Crimson Crescent now have raid difficulty bonuses. All of our comments and screenshots have been consolidated and moved over to these new pages in 6.0 to reduce database clutter.

Warlords of Draenor quest items like Frostwolf Hunting Crossbow now display uncommon, rare, and epic versions. When completing a Draenor quest, the reward has a low chance to be rare or epic.

Warlords of Draenor dungeon items like Robes of Swirling Light now display a Heroic option as well as bonuses that modify the required level and item level. The same item can drop in most dungeons--just scaled appropriately to the dungeon's difficulty and intended level.

Since initially writing this blog, we have refactored all of the tools in the database to work smoothly with the new item system. From selecting items in the Compare tool to viewing a 3D model for a particular raid difficulty to filtering for particular stats or item levels, the database should work smoothly.

Comments

Comment by SadisticPretzel

Blizzard needs to learn what "solo" means. If you're still having to involve other people, it's not solo.

Comment by Jimbrooks

on 2014/05/16 21:08:45

just...wow.

my warlock crit value : 50%haste : 60%

goodbye hit i wont miss you

Comment by LoKHor

on 2014/05/16 21:11:53

This is an excellent explanatory summary of stats and gear. I was a bit confused over this talk of tertiary stats and didn't quite get the whole primary/secondary thing either. The item squish really has squished things a lot, hasn't it! It's also surprising to see them dropping so many enchants; a lot of gear improvements had got quite bloated. Reducing gems and enchants, and removing reforging is a great way to simplify the game in terms of gear and understanding what your gear is and does. Augmentation (rare tertiary stats) sounds neat.

It should be interesting to see the improvements in intelligent loot tables and how people gear up as well as get used to all of the changes. I can't wait to see how this all plays out and how it will feel to start running heroics and raids and get all geared up (with little need to muck around with enchanting and whatnot!) for more difficult content; and to feel altogether more powerful. :)

Edit: I won't miss hit either! Sheesh. ;)

Comment by Nukedboom

on 2014/05/16 21:16:17

I'm not sure if I like it. I just can't wrap my head around the dodge, parry and spirit thing.Other than that It's all good but eh.

Comment by TheWheatOne

on 2014/05/16 21:40:57

Blizzard needs to learn what "solo" means. If you're still having to involve other people, it's not solo.

Yeah, its like, why can't they have private realms with only one person in it? No other players to interrupt you at anything such as quests, dailies, farming, mat collecting, and other things IN A MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER ROLE PLAYING GAME. I mean, seriously, why even have pugs technically being considered solo content? Scenarios and Dungeons and LFR, are definitely not solo. You have to que and involve other people right? Even if you couldn't give one speck of loyalty to anyone around you, since they are anonymous and likely won't ever see them again, just like that person who stole and killed your rare creature before you could get to tag it or that line in front of you to kill that quest boss, it doesn't matter because they are still persons who also inhabit the content you are doing, and therefore you are not totally solo.

Lets just have Bliz make an instance-type content with only true solo players in it, and not have them interact with any one else ever, if that is what they want. No cities. No AH. No farmers having cleared your mats from the map. Everything is alive when you get to a zone. Your toon is the only non-npc you'll ever see. Even better, make it as an entire path of ilvling content, and whole system of dedication to this demographic for the whole expansion.

/s

tl;dr SEMANTICS

Comment by PragmaticSoul

on 2014/05/16 22:06:44

I thought that tanks had LESS chance to be parried? The description implies the opposite:

. In addition, all players now have 0% chance to be dodged and 3% chance to be parried. Tanks receive an additional 3% chance to be parried.

Comment by Kassane

on 2014/05/16 22:09:51

the scaling was so silly the squish is kinda needed

Comment by PragmaticSoul

on 2014/05/16 22:13:50

much snippage

Sigh.

Okay, bit of a straw man there...

Some of us don't like group PvE. That means dungeons, raids, scenarios, whatever.

We're questers. We'll happily run all the quests. We'll happily do dailies (in whatever form they take in WoD). We'll happily jump in place 500 times in a row, as long as it gets us better gear.

But for us, "social" means "chat with guildies while playing."

Blizzard didn't recognize that in MoP. We've gone three patches without a substantial increase in our iLvl. Meantime, we've gone from "same iLvl as prior tier's normal raid gear (but with no set bonuses)" to... well, it's the same gear, but now it's "same iLvl as three tier's normal raid gear ago."

Now, please don't leap in with "you have to raid if you want raid gear," okay? We don't want raid gear. We want gear that's the same iLvl as the gear you disenchanted or vendored about a year ago.

Comment by stele22

on 2014/05/16 22:28:34

I also like the removal of exp and hit. 300% haste and 150% crit on ret pala. Sounds awesome :)

Comment by Gethe

Comment by korseki

There's an error. The timeless gear doesn't seem to be affected by stat squish , giving inflated numbers in the profiler. At least with regards to the stat squish for secondaries.

Comment by tankveyra

on 2014/05/17 03:08:01

wow, some pretty big changes going on.

Comment by Nulgar

on 2014/05/17 03:18:13

We're questers. We'll happily run all the quests. Blizzard didn't recognize that in MoP. We've gone three patches without a substantial increase in our iLvl. Meantime, we've gone from "same iLvl as prior tier's normal raid gear (but with no set bonuses)" to... well, it's the same gear, but now it's "same iLvl as three tier's normal raid gear ago."

Not sure what you're talking about.

Ignoring BoE crafted items and world drops:In BC, the maximum itemlevel available without any group content never changed and was about 5man normal for the maximum-level quests.In WotLK, the Argent Tournament gave solo access to weapons some certain armor pieces equivalent to loot from the initial 5man heroics.In Cata, we saw a change in that the Firelands dailies offered gear that was actually slighly higher in itemlevel than the previous raid tier's normal mode loot.In MoP 5.0, you could technically farm several items equivalent to the first raid tier with reputation - the length of that was, of course, detested by all. But at least now Valor Points were available without group content.In 5.1 and 5.2, new factions were introduced with new, slightly higher items that were more easily unlocked.While 5.4's Timeless Isle did not increase the itemlevel, it made acquiring these items far easier and for all slots (except weapons) as well as providing a way to upgrade these to a state better than the current raid's LFR loot - actually it's the iLvl of the heroic loot from last tier. "First one's free", the rest you have to grind for. Also, more ways to get VP.Technically, solo play relatively got a better progression this expansion than 5mans - there were no new dungeons, and excluding Heroic Scenarios, no true way to get better gear except with VP, which of course flowed in at a greater speed.

Comment by Adamsm

on 2014/05/17 04:58:28

There's an error. The timeless gear doesn't seem to be affected by stat squish , giving inflated numbers in the profiler. At least with regards to the stat squish for secondaries.

Could be due to the Timeless Items being auto generated. If you are seeing that, make a report in Feedback so they can look into it to get it fixed.

Comment by saturasxc

on 2014/05/17 05:34:10

I thought that tanks had LESS chance to be parried? The description implies the opposite:

. In addition, all players now have 0% chance to be dodged and 3% chance to be parried. Tanks receive an additional 3% chance to be parried.

Blizzard should REALLY consider to hire a native english speaking person, instead of these monkies that never heard about grammar or logic: You can parry an attack. The attack can be parried by someone. Your chance to parry is... - all these sentences makes sense, but this is nonsence: "Tanks receive an additional 3% chance to be parried" (by whom?) or this means tanks recieve an additional 3% chance TO PARRY?

Comment by Hoddie

on 2014/05/17 06:11:15

Great summary, explains it all really well. Thanks.

Comment by dafzor

on 2014/05/17 06:42:26

@saturasxc Wowhead staff does not work for Blizzard and that's a typo.